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Managing data growth is the top budget priority in the new year for IT departments. In its annual IT Storage Spending Predictions Survey, data management software company CommVault found that keeping pace with the explosive growth in data tops the concerns of IT departments.

The survey of 295 respondents included CIOs, vice presidents, IT directors, and managers or administrators for backup, server, and storage groups. After data growth management, the top budget priorities were network and equipment, disaster recovery, applications and other software, data backup and recovery, and virtual server requirements. Those top considerations were similar to what was revealed in the company's survey last year.

No Additional Personnel for 54%

Managing data growth includes data reduction, such as cutting redundant backup and archive data, in order to reduce backup windows, transfer less data across a network and reduce protection and recovery requirements.

Half of all respondents said their budgets would remain the same for 2012 as in the current year, while 32 percent said they would have an increase. Of the respondents, 43 percent predicted they would spend up to 10 percent on overall data protection, including hardware, software, services and support, and media. Slightly more than a third said their expenditures on overall data protection would amount to 11 percent to 20 percent of their budget.

But in spite of growth in data management and some growth in budgets, 54 percent reported that there would be no increase in IT personnel in their departments in the coming year. Sixteen percent said they expected some increase in head count, and 29 percent were undecided.

David West, senior vice president of marketing and business development at CommVault, said in a statement that this year's Predictions Survey reinforces "what we hear from customers on a daily basis." He added that "the rise of virtual servers, mobile devices and the use of social media in the workplace" is driving data growth.

Server Virtualization

Eighty-two percent of those surveyed are managing as many as 250 virtual servers, and 89 percent said their level of virtualization will increase in 2012. Almost half of the respondents had responsibility in their IT departments for managing 11 to 75 terabytes of primary data.

In August, a Storage Survey by industry research firm IDC of 509 European Storage Decision Makers, which similarly looked at storage spending plans, found that reducing storage-related costs was the top priority again in 2011, as it had been in recent years, because of the continuing "struggle with taming data growth." It also found that investment in new archiving solutions was one of the ways that those organizations are attempting to manage data growth efficiently.

The Oceanport, New Jersey-based CommVault, founded in 1996, offers backup software and other data management products. In the current survey, 57 percent of respondents worked in organizations of between 500 and 10,000 employees, in such industries as government, education, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, engineering and retail.

Online data storage has reduced costs in general. We have to remember that companies were spending so much money in general for external storage. Now we have sites such as www.mypdv.com, www.dropbox.com, www.box.net. The possibilities are endless....